I’m honoured to have been chosen as the Selected Poet for Issue 85 of Magma, especially because the theme of this issue is ‘Poems for Schools’. Copies of this issue have been sent to all the GCSE exam boards in an effort to tempt them to widen the range of poems and poets included in future English Literature anthologies.

In my long experience of teaching GCSE classes, there’s no particular formula for poems that 14-16 year-olds will enjoy reading and exploring. Teaching English would be very dull if that were the case. I’m impatient with lazy assumptions, such as that 21st century teenagers have no appetite for poems about nature, for example, or that they only want to read about issues that directly reflect their lives. I’ve witnessed students’ passionate reactions against the protagonist in ‘Hawk Roosting’ – ‘I hate that bird. He thinks he’s all that, but he aint!’ – and equally engaged conversations about the attitudes towards women suggested by the speaker in ‘She Walks in Beauty’, and the extent to which they’re still evident today. Good teaching, of the sort outlined by Barbara Bleiman in her excellent article in this issue, is, of course, the crucial factor in supporting students in their exploration of poetry and whetting their enthusiasm.

However, the GCSE poetry anthologies are long overdue an overhaul, beginning with a challenge to Michael Gove’s fixation with Romantic poetry, as if that era somehow represented the pinnacle of poetry written in English, and it’s been downhill ever since. The poems in this edition of Magma represent a much broader and more invigorating range of poets, themes and poetic forms, and I’ve already found many that I’d love to teach.

Recordings of my six poems from Issue 85 can be found here. If you’re an English teacher and you try any of these poems in your classroom, I’d love to hear about what you do with them and how your students respond.